Weekend Reading: A Close Call with a Serial Killer; “Human Stains”

“Center of the Universe,” which appeared in California’s Orange Coast magazine last month, is an unsettling, spine-tingling story by Jay Roberts, recounting an afternoon he spent with an active serial killer, in 1980. It is also, as Roberts writes, “a love story.” The killer’s name was Randy Kraft, a prolific murderer who may have killed as many as a hundred people. Many of his victims were young marines, as Roberts was when they met at a beach one afternoon. They had been talking for a while when Kraft asked Roberts back to his hotel room to have a beer. When you read about murderers “plying” their victims with drinks, or otherwise “luring” them, what you might not picture is the utterly disarming charm that Roberts describes. Indeed, this story could have been told very differently. It easily could have been angled for a “Whoa, that’s insane” effect. What’s truly remarkable about Roberts’s account is how honest he is about his own reactions to Kraft—how pliantly he responded to his requests, how hungry he was for his attentions. This is the story of a close call, but it is also the story of an infatuation, and of a very human desperation to be loved.

Another story of a killer, and of human desperation, is Jonathan Stock’s piece, for Spiegel International, “Atoning for Twenty Thousand War Crimes.” The story follows a Liberian ex-warlord named Joshua Milton Blahyi, who was responsible for thousands of deaths during his country’s long and bloody civil war. In those days, he went by the name General Butt Naked, because he believed that going into battle naked rendered him invulnerable. The atrocities he committed, mostly through his army of child soldiers, are grisly and numerous. These days, however, he claims to be a changed man. He’s now a pastor, and makes a practice of visiting the people he wronged and asking for forgiveness. Actually, he nearly insists on forgiveness, making it seem quite possible that, even if he is sorry for his crimes, he retains a tendency toward manipulation that makes him, in a new way, a threat to others. His story has no easy moral, and Stock resists the temptation to try to pin down Blahyi’s motivations, allowing him, instead, to represent the potential complications of redemption.

In The Appendix (a fairly new history publication, which I’d never seen before, though I’m glad I now have), Benjamin Breen has recounted the story of a man named George Psalmanazar who enjoyed a short period of celebrity in the early eighteenth century by pretending to be an aristocrat from Formosa (what we now call Taiwan). He penned complex, totally fabricated accounts of Formosan life that became authoritative texts on the country. If he’d lived any later, his ruse would have been painfully apparent (aside from everything else, he reportedly looked much more Dutch than he did Taiwanese), and he was eventually unmasked as an imposter. Along the way, however, he constructed an entire personality, an elaborate culture, and even a reasonably coherent language. Breen, who has conducted an in-depth academic study of Psalmanazar, considers him a creative genius, placing him within the tradition of early attempts by Europeans to place themselves within the wider world. Genius or charlatan, Psalmanazar is a fascinating character, and the weird old illustrations that accompany the piece are themselves reason enough to give it a look.

Finally, for something more Zen, “Human Stains,” by Heather Havrilesky, in Aeon Magazine, is the most moving meditation on laundry that you are likely ever to read. It’s perhaps best not to say much more about it, except that, obviously, it’s not just about laundry: it’s about the passage of time, the acceptance of change and of stasis, and the contemplation of mortality “among the filthy socks.”